U2 go away

While Bono and Tim Cook (pictured) might be excited about the release of U2's new album, not everyone is sharing their enthusiasm.

Toward the end of Tuesday's Apple event, Tim Cook and Bono announced that every iTunes user would be given the band's new album for free. 

While that might not sound like a bad thing, many people are angry over the way Apple chose to "gift" the album.

U2's new album, "Songs of Innocence," shows up in iTunes libraries as purchased, whether users have chosen to buy it or not. That has made a lot of people angry, as it's nearly impossible to get rid of the album.

Users who have opted to download new purchases to their iPhone automatically have found the new U2 album sitting on their phone since Tuesday. But even if iTunes users hadn't chosen automatic downloads, "Songs of Innocence" will still be displayed as an "iTunes in the Cloud" purchase.

That means it will still be shown as part of your music library, even if you delete all the tracks. The only way to make the U2 album go away is to go to your Mac or PC and hide all of your "iTunes in the Cloud" purchases, or to use iTunes to manually hide each track from your purchased items list.

Even then, the U2 album will lurk in your account, hidden until you decide you want it.

*** 9/15/14

U2 played at an Apple event last week that included the unveiling of the iPhone maker's new smartwatch and updated iPhone models. In a surprise move, the Irish rock band performed at the event and put out its 11-song release.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the new album would be given to the company's 500 million iTunes users. The release showed up in users' iTunes music libraries. The company said Monday that 33 million iTunes account holders have accessed the free album.

But some iTunes users took to Twitter to complain and ask how to remove it. While it was already possible to delete the album, Apple's tool makes it possible in one step.

Tool to remove the U2 album: http://bit.ly/1pgShH6

Apple's "how to" guide to deleting the album: http://bit.ly/1uDS46n

who's watching TV?

New analysis of television viewing trends shows the TV audience is aging much faster than previously believed, as Americans under the age of 50 turn away from network programming, even when DVR-captured delayed viewing is included.

Media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson Research says the median age of the TV audience in the 2013-14 season rose 6%, or 2.5 years, to 44.4 years, from four years earlier. In the past five years, he says, the age of the typical TV viewer has advanced 5% faster than that of the average American. (The 2012 U.S. Census report has the median age of the American population at 37.2).

This “ratings-weighted average age” has climbed by 7% in the past few years among broadcast networks, to 53.9 years, and 8% for cable networks, to 40 years.

The climb in broad TV audience age is almost entirely due to the rapid decline in traditional TV viewership by younger people – but not only the very young. Nathanson calculates primetime live viewing is down 13% since 2010, yet it has not dropped measurably among those over age 55. Even as older viewers maintain their traditional tube time, a separate Nielsen study found those between 50 and 64 watched 19 minutes of digital video last quarter, up from 11 minutes a year earlier.

The graying of the TV audience has a few big implications for the media industry. Advertisers and TV executives for years have focused on ratings within “the demo” – people between age 18 and 49 – almost to the exclusion of others.

Standard wisdom has held that advertisers seek younger viewers because their brand loyalties are still shifting, making them susceptible to marketing messages. Companies still are willing to pay a premium to get at these coveted consumers, but as they become an ever-smaller part of the TV audience, programmers may no longer try to fashion shows for them.

Nathanson says he was prompted to examine the age breakdown of TV ratings by a reader of his reports “who also happens to be a senior cable network research executive,” who suggested that “more networks are now competing for older demographics and focusing less on the more ‘elusive’ younger demos.”

While he says he can’t prove such a shift has taken hold, Nathanson figures it’s logical to expect “more ‘Blue Bloods,’ more ‘CSIs,” to cite two typical CBS one-hour police dramas popular with that network’s older loyalists.

In this way, scripted TV might follow in the path of Broadway theater, a once-broad medium that came to be dominated by global tourists and older folks. Now, most Broadway productions are made specifically for tourists and older people. Similarly but on the other end of the spectrum, Hollywood economics became over-reliant on young men and the global box office,  so comic book vehicles and other effects-laden blockbusters hog studio budgets.

There are other implications of the slow aging and winnowing of the TV audience.

- Expect the continued escalation in the cost of sports-league television rights. Live sports in general, and pro football most of all, is the only form of programming that reliably reaches younger eyeballs in real time.

- Advertisers will turn their attention even more intensely toward Facebook Inc. (FB) and other social networks, which younger consumers increasingly use as their portal to media and pretty much everything else. Facebook's towering $200 billion valuation certainly reflects broad expectations it's becoming the main consumer advertising platform for this century.

- Programmers will be increasingly willing to experiment with alternative distribution platforms for their content. With less risk of cannibalizing one’s core younger audience by offering shows on Netflix Inc. (NFLX), networks will try to cut deals to reach the mobile, “time-shifting” viewer, wherever he or she can be found.

- In terms of the shows themselves, we might see even more formulaic dramas and sitcoms, more pharmaceutical commercials and more older leading men and women in primetime, to better reflect the core viewing audience, rather than the sleeker, younger people who aren’t paying attention now anyway.

iWatch unveiled (as the Apple Watch)

CUPERTINO Calif. (Reuters) - Apple Inc unveiled a watch, two larger iPhones and a mobile payments service on Tuesday as Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook seeks to revive the technology company's reputation as a wellspring of innovation.

The first new product to be developed and introduced under Cook's reign is a timepiece tethered to the iPhone that will combine health and fitness tracking with communications. It will price at $349 and go on sale in early 2015.

First impressions were mixed. Some expected Apple to blow away the current competition but others warned the fact that it requires a paired iPhone may limit its sales.

Starting at $349 - $50 more than the cheapest version of the iPhone 6 with a contract, the lofty price tag may also keep some consumers on the sidelines. It could go up to more than $1,000 for higher-end editions, IDC analyst Danielle Levitas said.

The Apple Watch can receive phone calls and messages, play music, serve as a digital wallet to pay for goods and monitor heart rates via special sensors. The watches will come in three collections, including a sport edition and an upscale line coated in 18-karat gold.

"People are kind of scratching their heads on this watch, especially the fact that to successfully use the watch and to take advantage of its capabilities, you also have to have an iPhone," said Daniel Morgan, vice president at Synovus Trust Company in Atlanta. "I don't know if they're in the right direction with this iWatch."

Still, rival watch and wearable device makers will keep a wary eye on Apple, which upended the music industry and drove once-dominant phone makers like Blackberry to the brink of extinction.

Sony Corp, Samsung, LG Electronics Inc and Qualcomm Inc have already launched smartwatches, albeit without much success.

“Not the knockout some were anticipating. A bit gimmicky also on the health end of the wearable bands market," said Jon Cox, an analyst of Swiss watch companies at brokerage Kepler Cheuvreux in Zurich.

"Not as cool as I feared. Nick Hayek is probably sleeping a little easier tonight,” Cox said, referring to the chief executive of Swatch Group.

The watch is unlikely to increase Apple's top-line. Estimates vary but IDC expects total global demand of 42 million smartwatches in 2015. Apple sells that many or more iPhones in a good quarter.

But the pressure was on for the world's largest tech company to wow on Tuesday, after a years-long drought of products beyond new iPhones and iPads. The prospect of a new gadget attracted a broader swathe of attendees than usual, with celebrities, fashion industry editors and even healthcare executives rounding out the mostly tech-industry crowd.

Also on Tuesday, the company took the wraps off a larger, 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus. They will support more than 200 telecoms carriers worldwide, including all three in China - a key growth market for the company.

And it introduced a new mobile payments service dubbed "Apple Pay." Each phone will come equipped with its new payments service, which launches in the United States next month and allows users to pay for items in stores with their phones instead of physically presenting their credit or debit cards.

Launch partners include Walt Disney Co, McDonald's and Whole Foods. The move gives Apple access to a trove of data on how consumers shop in brick and mortar stores, where more than 90 percent of U.S. retail sales are still conducted.

Each new iPhone will come with a "secure element" chip and a near-field communications, or NFC, antenna.

Ronald Wayne

When people think about the original founders of Apple, most people usually think of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. These guys are two of the most notable figures in tech history. However, Apple has a third co-founder that is rarely ever mentioned. In fact, the latest Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher didn’t even include him as a character.

Meet Ronald Wayne, some media outlets in the past has dubbed him as “the unluckiest man in the world”, because he sold his 10% stake in Apple 12 days after co-founding the company — his stake would be worth around $35 billion today [with a b]. Aside from that, in the early 1990′s he saw that Apple was plummeting and decided to sell the original document of the first Apple company agreement for $500. After nearly two decades, that same exact document was sold at an auction for $1.8 million dollars. Now if you think thats not bad enough, at one point in his life, he had all his life savings stolen from him as well. He likes to summarize his entrepreneurial enterprises as always being “either a day late, and/or a dollar short”.

A random story about Steve Jobs

I had a stamp store in Tucson, Arizona. And I got a phone call, from Steve Jobs, direct. It hadn’t happen before! “Hi Steve, how’re you doing?” He says, “Look, I haven’t got a whole lot of time. There would be airline tickets waiting for you at the airport and my chauffeur would pick you up when you get here at San Jose and we’ll set you up — no it was San Francisco because they set me up at the Mark Hopkins. And I said, “Well what’s this all about?” He says, “We’re doing a presentation and I thought it would be nice of you to join us.

Okay, fine, but I was wondering what the heck is this is all about. What’s going on here because Steve… this is out of character for Steve Jobs. But anyway, okay. So I got on the plane, got picked up on the airport, they set me up in the hotel. The next morning, he has people come in and pick me up and take me down to the auditorium where they were doing a presentation on G3, I think it was — something like that. They were presenting [the iMac]. Anyway, he did this spiel on stage and afterwards he comes and gets me and we go over the back and there’s a buffet with coffee and sandwiches and whatever and we took the tour of the convention, and we jumped in the car we go off to the Apple facility where Steve Wozniak joins us in the cafeteria, had lunch and we’re sitting in this table out in the patio. They’re carrying on this conversation about absolutely nothing — small talk — and then that’s it. Have a good trip back and we’ll see you! And I’m thinking was all, “What the heck was this all about?” And I never was able in my life to find out what the heck it was all about. It was very anticlimactic! At the end, as I’m on the plane going home, “It must have been something he had in mind! What did he do this for?” I couldn’t understand! [I] still don’t know to this day what that was all about.